Following Bernie Sander's unsuccessful campaign for the Presidential nomination in 2016, the Democratic Party has once more become a site of struggle for socialists. Leading up to the November 6th midterms, could the Democratic Party, in fact, be the best vehicle for social change? In this essay, first published over 30 years ago, Mike Davis warns us about the pitfalls of electoralism, and the passive clientelism that tends to replace popular politics under the bureaucratic guidance of the Democratic Party.

In this excerpt from the epilogue to his landmark 1986 Prisoners of the American Dream, Mike Davis sketches the necessary conditions to build an independent left politics that has real and effective social anchorage in the United States.

Domenico Losurdo looks at the foundational link between liberalism and Atlantic slavery, and liberal philosophers' shifting positions on slavery in the period between Somersett v Stewart and the American Civil War.

We were born from the confluence that is taking place between workers in neighborhoods, in factories, in the popular economy, between domestic workers, care workers, precarious workers, among those organized in unions and multiple other feminist collectives, among those who don’t have a visible boss but engage in piece work in their homes and those who are unemployed workers.